Fusion startups have a difficult line to hoe. Their mission? No one has ever been to create a new kind of power plant that produces more energy than it consumes. This means proving that their technology works and can scale it, ensuring that it is all profitable to investors. It’s already an expensive order. However, there is another major challenge that is less likely to attract attention. It’s where you can get fuel.
Most fusion startups will say they produce their own fuel, thank you very much. And technically, they’re right. But the answer messes up the key points. To make tritium (one of the key components of fusion), a specific isotopes of lithium are first required.
The idea came to light a few years ago when Charlie Jarott worked for energy focused on fusion startups.
“We’ve realized that no one is working on this supply chain. There are many fusion companies. There are no single companies that make fuel for those companies,” he told TechCrunch.
So Jarott and his focused energy colleague Jacob Peterson decided to set up Hexium with an eye to solving Fusion’s future fuel problems.
Hexium, operating at Stealth, appeared on Tuesday at $9.5 million in seed funds and credit facilities. Mac Venture Capital and Refactor led the round with Humba Ventures, Julian Capital, Overtuer VC and R7 Partners.
Hexium’s main technology uses decades-old methods of separating lithium isotopes using lasers. Atomic Vapor Laser Isotope Separation (AVLIS) was completed by the Ministry of Energy in the 1980s and sorted the uranium isotopes. However, after spending $2 billion to prepare Avris to produce uranium for nuclear power plants, the Cold War ended, with thousands of tons of nuclear fuel flooding the market through old Soviet weapon-grade uranium.
As a result, Ablis sat more or less unused until a few years ago when hexium picked up the technology and fine-tuned it to organize the lithium isotopes.
To do this, startups use lasers that can be adjusted with picometer accuracy. What hexium uses is relatively low power – “We’re talking about tattoo removal energy,” Peterson said, but their accuracy allows them to interact with certain lithium isotopes.
Like most elements, lithium is not just one composition: protons, neutrons, and electrons. In the wild, there are two stable isotopes. Lithium 6 has three protons, three neutrons and three electrons. Lithium-7, with additional neutrons. Each isotope has its own signature, expressed as a wave function, so to speak. Think of it as a way that different people’s voices produce different waves when visualised on a computer. Hexium tunes the laser to interact with only the lithium-6 wavefunction.
“It’s just blown right off by a lithium-7 atom. It’s not noticed,” Jarott said.
To separate lithium-6 from lithium-7, the company lights its lasers against a vaporized cloud of metal. When the laser hits a lithium-6 atom, it is ionized. The ionized atoms are drawn into an electric charging plate where they condense into a liquid and flow into a water-like trough outside the ice-like glass.
Hexium then packages lithium 6 and sells it to a fusion company. It uses metals to breed tritium fuel, protecting pilots and commercial reactors from harmful radiation. What about the remaining lithium-7? It is sold to traditional nuclear reactor operators. Traditional nuclear reactors use their isotopes as protective additives for cooling water.
Next year, hexium will use seed funds to build and operate a pilot plant. If everything goes well, hexium replicates its design in modular fashion, producing dozens to hundreds of kilograms of lithium-6.
“We don’t need to build facilities on the scale of Costco or football stadiums,” Peterson said. “We can do that at a facility on the scale of Starbucks, achieving great economics on a very small scale and parallel processes.”
Update: Includes additional details regarding seed funds.
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